A windrower typically consists of a self-propelled tractor or similar vehicle, and a cutting mechanism which is either towed by the tractor or carried thereby. The cutting mechanism carried by a windrower is typically referred to as a header, and is supported on the windrower by forwardly projecting arms. Current practice in agriculture is to cut a relatively wide swath of the crop within a range of anywhere between 10 and 16 or more feet in width, and then consolidate the crop into a narrower, substantially continuous windrow, in which form the crop is left to dry in the field until the moisture content has been reduced to a value suitable for subsequent harvesting operations, such as baling.
More current practice is to combine multiple windrows together as they are being mowed. This practice eliminates a raking operation and also reduces the number of passes of subsequent harvesting operations (e.g., chopping and baling). With the advent of higher capacity forage harvesters and balers, merging windrows is become a more desirable practice. Windrow merging attachments are thus becoming more prevalent on harvesting machines. However, merging windrows may not always be desirable when using harvesters having a windrow merging attachment installed. Currently known merger attachments are generally manually installed and positioned, thus selecting between conventional windrow and merged windrow operation requires windrower down-time to effect the change.
It would be a great advantage to provide a windrow merging attachment for a harvester that enabled an operator to selectively position the merging attachment between working and non-working positions while the windrower is operating thereby overcoming the above problems and disadvantages.